Confession of a Digger
http://www.frasercoastchronicle.com.au/story/2010/04/17/confession-of-a-digger/
Toni Mcrae
17th April 2010
YESTERDAY Australia's proud history in the Vietnam War plunged from
heroic to the unthinkable when, after 44 years, a soldier finally
admitted that he and two officer interrogators had lied to the
highest levels of the Australian military and government about the
torture of a young Vietnamese woman.
Maryborough's Peter Barham, a former SAS sergeant, has broken his
silence to reveal he was in the Nui Dat army tent in October 1966
when the young Vietnamese woman was tortured.
"These two soldier cowboys bound her wrists behind her back, placed a
wet towel across her face and as she breathed in the towel went in
and they poured water down her," the former army interpreter said.
"They weren't that good at it but it went on for at least half an
hour and I felt sick but couldn't leave the tent because I was the
interpreter and had to relay what she said during her torture.
"She was distressed and this was after the soldiers asked me to tell
her in Vietnamese that they would pull her nails out, stick objects
up her orifices and do to her just about anything else very painful
that you could imagine.
"But when the Australian government launched the inquiry into the
water torture case we had to lie and it was swept under the carpet.
I've lived with that lie for 44 years but no more because it played a
great part in wrecking my life."
With Mr Barham's confession this week the reputations of the
highest-ranking members of the Australian military, Australian
parliamentarians, including then-prime minister John Gorton and his
army minister Philip Lynch, have been badly damaged.
It took until 1968, for the water torture of To Thi Nau,
self-confessed head of the communist Military Proselytising Committee
in Hoa Long, to hit the Australian headlines.
The story of the "war crime" took more column inches of newsprint
than the Tet Offensive and Long Tan. The water torture incident
horrified a credulous nation and branded the Australian war as cruel
and barbaric.
At the time, Brigadier Oliver Jackson, who was running the war from
HQ in Nui Dat, ordered an investigation because the woman's alleged
treatment was clearly against the Geneva Convention.
One of the interrogators, Warrant Officer Ken Borland, it emerged,
had no authority to interrogate prisoners, and was removed from further duties.
But by then Peter Barham was back in Australia, a broken man, because
of the pressures of having to lie about the water torture and even
worse his four months attached to the South Vietnamese No. 10 unit,
operating 20km from Nui Dat.
"The South Vietnamese wouldn't sign the Geneva Convention and they
therefore had the right to kill anyone under interrogation. I stood
alongside those interrogators for four months straight so I could
relay information from their victims back to our HQ.
"Imagine every atrocity on the human body and mind that is possible
to imagine and you may come somewhere near what they did and what I saw.
"I was medivac-ed out of Vietnam, a wreck. The army back in Australia
put me into the SAS in Perth and gave me the rank of sergeant.
"Later I was put into the Point Cook in Victoria, our military
language school once again, this time to learn Chinese in a year. I
topped the class, as I had done two years before in Vietnamese. They
then told me I was so proficient I would be sent back to 'Nam to work
in 'psychological warfare'.
"I said 'Thank you but no thank you never again' and resigned from
the army to spend the next few decades as an out-of-control alcoholic."
Historical reports show that three journalists claimed they witnessed
the Vietnamese woman prisoner's arrival and part of her
interrogation. The three were John Sorell of the Melbourne Herald,
Geoffrey Murray of AAP and Gabriel Carpay, a freelance photographer.
Not one reported the "water torture" in 1966; only Murray filed a
story, on the woman's capture, which failed to mention her harsh
treatment. Murray later said, as revealed in Trish Payne's book, War
and Words: "I had no intention of writing a story along torture
lines," acknowledging that he lacked the information.
Sorell later claimed that military censorship had prevented him
writing the story in 1966, a claim the army denied; yet in 1968 all
three would report that the woman had been tortured but none had
been in the interrogation tent.
Eighteen months later, in March 1968, American journalist Martin Russ
revealed in his book Happy Hunting Ground that Australian soldiers
had water tortured a Vietnamese civilian.
Attuned to the growing anti-war feelings of readers, the Australian
media leapt on the story as evidence of a home-grown atrocity: here
was the face of Australian evil in Vietnam.
The hysteria drove Phillip Lynch, the new minister for the army, to
declare on national television that he could find "not one scintilla
of evidence for the charge".
Lynch looked lacking the next day when Sorell wrote a sensational
account of the "torture", which the inexperienced Lynch, ignoring the
army's protests, accepted as essentially true.
Then-prime minister John Gorton added oil to the fire: the woman had
been well enough to pose for photos after her "torture", he told parliament.
"A bit wet perhaps?" interjected a Labor MP.
"Yes, a little wet, I agree," Gorton said.
The remark inflamed the anti-war movement: campuses were aghast. The
government's boorishness and flippancy merely added to the outrage,
and seemed tacitly to confirm that Australian soldiers had tortured a
Vietnamese woman.
The "water torture" case became part of the popular mythology that
Australian troops were routinely committing atrocities. The real
story of the woman's capture was that a platoon led by Second
Lieutenant John O'Halloran traced a radio wire, found in the Nui Dinh
Hills, to a cave. Inside they found a US radio and, wedged into a
crevice above, "like a spider suspended from the roof", a young
Vietnamese woman. The Australians detained her; she spent the night
tied to O'Halloran, who told her she would be shot if his men were attacked.
She was delivered safely to Nui Dat on October 25, 1966. Dragged to
the interrogation tent, she started to scream when her gag and
blindfold were removed. Australian warrant officer Ken Borland
shouted and banged his fists when she refused to speak, then
threatened the "water treatment".
Major Alex Piper, the staff officer responsible for organising the
interrogation, was "a bit stunned" when he entered the tent to find
Borland administering the punishment, which Piper soon ordered to
cease. She was photographed and handed over to the South Vietnamese.
The 23-year old was "re-programmed" in Bien Hoa.
Mr Barham said he had initially spent 45 minutes alone with the woman
interrogating her and he decided she was a nurse who had been made to
join the Viet Cong.
"I believe all their threats of torture and the actual torture gave
us nothing new."
Former Central School and Maryborough High student Mr Barham only
told his wife about the water torture truth a few months back.
"I have kept this bottled up for too long. I used to swear that Viet
vets asking for compensation, let alone recognition of their war
service, were just wankers. This I said while I was rolling around in
the gutters in my own vomit with no money in my pockets and nowhere
to live. Then one day I realised I was one of those people I had been
calling wankers.
"War stuffs up young men and they go on to stuff up others' lives as
I did. It's all about hurt, hurt, hurt and you change after war and
you become angry and violent and in my case you try to drink yourself
to oblivion.
"I am glad I have spoken the truth after so long."
'I've lived with that lie for 44 years but no more...'
.
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